And its face seemed to ripple and change even as he looked at it. It was Jud’s face, dead and staring; it was the dented, ruined face of Victor Pascow, eyes rolling mindlessly; it was, mirrorlike, Louis’s own, so dreadfully pale and lunatic. Then it changed again and became the face of that creature in the woods—the low brow, the dead yellow eyes, the tongue long and pointed and bifurcated, grinning and hissing.
“No, no, no-no-no—”
It bucked beneath him. The hypo flew out of Louis’s hand and rolled a short way down the hail. He groped for another, brought it out, and jammed it straight down into the small of Gage’s back.
It screamed beneath him, body straining and sunfishing, nearly throwing him off. Grunting, Louis got the third syringe and jammed this one home in Gage’s arm, depressing the plunger all the way. He got off then and began to back slowly down the hallway. Cage got slowly to his feet and began to stagger toward him. Five steps and the scalpel fell from its hand. It struck the floor blade first and stuck itself in the wood, quivering. Ten steps and that strange yellow light in its eyes began to fade. A dozen and it fell to its knees.
Now Cage looked up at him and for a moment Louis saw his son—
his real son—his face unhappy and filled with pain.
“Daddy!” he cried, and then fell forward on his face.
Louis stood there for a moment, then went to Gage, moving carefully, expecting some trick. But there was no trick, no sudden leap with clawed hands. He slid his fingers expertly down Gage’s
throat, found the pulse, and held it. He was then a doctor for the last time in his life, monitoring the pulse, monitoring until there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside.
When it was gone at last, Louis got up and sauntered down the hail to a far corner. He crouched there, pulling himself into a ball, cramming himself into the corner, tighter and tighter. He found he could make himself smaller if he put a thumb in his mouth and so he did that.
He remained that way for better than two hours. . . and then, little by little, a dark and oh-so-plausible idea came to him. He pulled his thumb from his mouth. It made a small pop. Louis got himself (hey-ho let’s go)
going again.
In the room where Gage had hidden, he stripped the sheet from the bed and took it out into the hail. He wrapped his wife’s body in it, gently, with love. He was humming but did not realize it.
He found gasoline in Jud’s garage. Five gallons of it in a red can next to the Lawnboy. More than enough. He began in the kitchen where Jud still lay under the Thanksgiving tablecloth. He drenched that, then moved into the living room with the can still upended, spraying amber gas over the rug, the sofa, the magazine rack, the chairs, and so out into the downstairs hail and toward the back bedroom. The smell of gas was strong and rich.
Jud’s matches were by the chair where he had kept his fruitless watch, on top of his cigarettes. Louis took them. At the front door he tossed a lighted match back over his shoulder and stepped out.
The blast of the heat was immediate and savage, making the skin on his neck feel too small. He shut the door neatly and only stood on the porch for a moment, watching the orange flickers
behind Norma’s curtains. Then he crossed the porch, pausing for a moment, remembering the beers he and Jud had drunk here a million years ago, listening to the soft, gathering roar of fire within the house.
Then he stepped out.
62
Steve Masterton came around the curve just before Louis’s house and saw the smoke immediately—not from Louis’s place, but from the house that belonged to the old duck across the street.
He had come out this morning because he had been worried about Louis—deeply worried. Chariton had told him about Rachel’s call of the day before, and that had set him to wondering just where Louis was. . . and what he was up to.
His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind—he wasn’t going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay. . . or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped onto his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he’d had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up—a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheist’s Society for two semesters and had dropped out
only when his advisor had told him—privately and very much off the record—that it might hurt his chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow.
Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra’s relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them—an uncle he cared for very much—might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton’s mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother’s chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow—his wife’s sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis’s little boy.
He liked Louis enormously, and he wanted to make sure Louis was all right. Louis had been through hell lately.
When he saw the billows of smoke, his first thought was that this was something else to lay at the door of Victor Pascow, who seemed, in his dying, to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck. But that was stupid, and Louis’s house was the proof. It stood calm and white, a little piece of clean-limbed New England architecture in the midmorning sun.
People were running toward the old duck’s house, and as Steve banked his bike across the road and pulled into Louis’s driveway, he saw a man dash up onto the old duck’s porch, approach the front door, and then retreat. It was well that he did; a moment later the glass pane in the center of the door blew out, and flames boiled
through the opening. If the fool actually had gotten the door open, the blowout would have cooked him like a lobster.
Steve dismounted and put the Honda on its kickstand, Louis momentarily forgotten. He was drawn by all the old mystery of fire. Maybe half a dozen people had gathered; except for the would-be hero, who lingered on the Crandalls’ lawn, they kept a respectful distance. Now the windows between the porch and the house blew out. Glass danced in the air. The would-be hero ducked and ran for it. Flames ran up the inner wail of the porch like groping hands, blistering the white paint. As Steve watched, one of the rattan easy chairs smouldered and then exploded into flame.
Over the crackling sounds, he heard the would-be hero cry out with a shrill and absurd sort of optimism: “Gonna lose her! Gonna lose her sure! If Jud’s in there, he’s a gone goose! Told im about the creosote in that chimbly a hunnert times!”
Steve opened his mouth to holler across and ask if the fire department had been called, but just then he heard the faint wail of sirens, approaching. A lot of them. They had been called, but the would-be hero was right: the house was going. Flames probed through half a dozen broken windows now, and the front eave had grown an almost transparent membrane of fire over its bright green shingles.
He turned back, then, remembering Louis—but if Louis were here, wouldn’t he be with the others across the street?